I’ve written at LWCM about focussing on the end users, not the customers. While customers may be good for short term cash, lasting value comes from making end users happy through delivering to them valuable services and products. In turn, companies that create a culture of over-delivering to end user needs, who execute well, and …
Continue reading “Much ado about strawberry jam: End Users please Air New Zealand”
Punakaiki Fund issued this press release just over a week ago. Pre-registrations are going along very well. We are meeting with selected accredited investors in the coming weeks, so get in touch if you would like to be included. I cannot really say more than this due to securities law. Punakaiki Fund Limited (Punakaiki) is pleased …
Some early stage investment is speculative, and other investment is into a steady growth curve. Christchurch based mass spectrometer company Syft seemed to never want to emerge from the speculative early stage, absorbing over $30m of investment and revenue without ever lifting out of the starting blocks. But now things have changed. There’s a new …
NZX – MRP – Mighty River Power, originally uploaded by LanceWiggs. A lot of people are visiting the NZX.com site today, with one thing on their mind – the Mighty River Power float. How delightful when we see in NZX an organisation that understands what its visitors want. A hearty well done.
No – they are not the same company. Sadly Kiwi Melissa Clark-Reynolds’ MiniMonos is closing down. It’s a virtual world for kids full of monkeys, and seems to have had a good run, so this is a tough time for Melissa and her team. The tag line is “love to play, love the planet” and …
Continue reading “MiniMonos is closing; MinoMonsters is hiring.”
In the news recently is University of Massachusetts Amherst economics doctoral student Thomas Herndon, who reworked a very influential paper, and found some real calculation errors. He dug into the “Growth in a Time of Debt” paper by Harvard’s Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff as part of a class assignment, where students were asked to rework the numbers …
Continue reading “Integrity: What to do if your academic paper is challenged”
<update = 10:20, Friday morning I’ve edited this post since publishing last night.> Let’s have a look at the Greens proposal to reduce electricity prices. I’m entering this as a sceptic, but also as founder of Powerkiwi [join!]. Powerkiwi sold a good amount of power on Powershop last year – 140 million units (KWh), or …
Continue reading “Electrickery – 10 alternative suggestions for changing NZ’s electricity industry”
Buried in this MBIE report on the tourism outcome from the 2011 Rugby World cup was this chart: The little red pice of the left hand side of the bottom bar represents the percentage of people who gave their trip to New Zealand a 5 out of 10. That’s not a great trip for them …
Continue reading “New Zealand’s tourists are very very happy”
(I was going to save this for Nine To Noon tomorrow, where I’m doing the technology segment, but things are moving fast. But do listen in) A few people have muttered, sometimes out loud, that one possibility for the apparently uneconomic Tiwai point aluminium smelter is to switch it to become a data center. So …
Continue reading “Can we replace the Tiwai smelter with a data center?”
About a year and a quarter ago I was lucky enough to do some consulting work for Syft Technologies, a technology led company with a better mass spectrometer. They were well known for a few years, and even listed for a time, until it became clear that they were failing to make the transition from …
Continue reading “Let’s stop hurting our container opening dock and warehouse workers”
Patrick Smellie reports in the NBR that Meridian are unlikely to reach an agreement with Rio Tinto on renegotiating the 18 year electricity supply agreement for Tiwai aluminium smelter. I guess it’s time I should weigh in, and support Meridian in standing firm. I’ve helped lead a turnaround of an aluminium smelter or two, and have seen the …
Continue reading “Stand firm Meridian on Tiwai – we can all win here”
Not Found, originally uploaded by LanceWiggs. A real basic failure from Novopay that is symptomatic of the much greater issues. Even now, months after launch, the site does not resolve unless you type the full http://www.novopay.govt.nz. I have not typed www for over 13 years, and neither should anyone else have to. Examining the site …
Lightknight is receiving customer interest, reports Christopher Adams from the NZHerald (no paywall yet). So I thought I’d check them out. I had no idea I could also give them a big order. It seems like a good product – lights that go on HiViz vests to increase visibility at night, and arising from a stated industry need. …
Nothing advanced here, originally uploaded by LanceWiggs. A search for my site on Google shows only one post has an Advanced reading level – and it was written by my father. Read what you like into that.
Over on 200Square Grant Wakelin wonders whether some house auctions are illegal: ..real estate sales and auctions are governed by among other things the Real Estate Agents Act 2008. Under those rules there is a case to argue that property auctions run the way they are today are not in compliance with the Act and …
Lance Wiggs 